Technical Debt is usually referred to as something Bad. One of my other articles The Solution to Technical Debt certainly implies that, and most other articles and books on the topic are all about how to get rid of technical debt.

But is debt always bad? When can debt be good? How can we use technical debt as tool, and distinguish between Good and Bad debt?

Dealing with multiple teams in a product development organization is always a challenge!

One of the most impressive examples I’ve seen so far is Spotify. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Spotify on and off ever since the company was founded, and it’s one of the few companies I’ve seen with a truly agile culture. Spotify has grown a lot lately and now has hundreds of developers divided into 30 agile teams spread over 4 cities in 3 timezones. So how is this managed?

Special thanks to Alistair Cockburn, Tom & Mary Poppendieck, Jeff Patton, Ron Jeffries, Jeff Sutherland, and Michael Dubakov for providing many of the models, metaphors, and ideas that I use in this presentation.

Here are the slides for my talk “Lean from the Trenches” at Agile2012. And here is the book/ebook, in case you want more details (unfortunately sold out in the conference bookstore). Thanks for attending!

However, I’ve learned a lot since 2006 and there some things that I would have done differently if I could go back in time.

Purpose of this presentation is to share these insights with you.

I came up with 15 concrete recommendations that I believed would be very widely applicable. Based on the polls that we did during this presentation, the hypothesis seemed correct! Every single recommendation got 90-100% Green votes from the audience. Or maybe you were just trying to be nice… Well, anyway, thanks for your feedback!

Here are the slides from my seminar "Vad är ett agilt projekt" (What is an agile project) at PMI in Stockholm. I was happy to see so many participants, and impressed that you managed to stay awake & engaged despite the fact that it was an evening seminar with very comfortable chairs :o)

Don Reinertsen has been on our "people that we really have to bring to Stockholm" list for a long time! Don is author of one of my favorite books "Managing the Design Factory", and his teachings have been a key source of inspiration to many thought leaders such as Mary Poppendieck and David Anderson.Don focuses on quantification and economic justification for improvement actions, and provides practical methods rather than general philosophical principles.

"Simple" is a word often used in agile software development. Terms like YAGNI and "do the simplest thing that can possibly work". It is easy to forget, however, that Simple is often Hard! So what’s hard about becoming an agile software developer, where are the bumps in the ride?

In this talk I went through some aspects of agile software development that many developers find to be hard, or even unpleasant initially.

I passed two microphones around and had the audience act out Ola the Optimist and Pete the Pessimist whenever their quotes popped up. It was like a live commentary of the presentation from two different perspectives. Great fun :o)

Here is InfoQ’s video recording of my 90 minute session "10 ways to Screw up with Scrum and XP" at Agile 2008 in Toronto. And here are the slides too.

Too bad the slide animations and the audience participation doesn’t show up, and that you mostly see the back of my head (the camera was off to one side). It was a fun session though, and the participants seemed to enjoy it. It was voted for re-run on the last day of the conference so I got to do it twice.